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Nomads and Migrants: Negotiating a Multicultural
Postmodernism
Rafael Perez-Torres
161
162 Rafael Perez-Torres
The rupture within the linguistic realm finds its homology in all
epistemological realms. The rubble of language functions in the
same way that the rubble of history or the rubble of identity func-
tion: sites of postmodern dissolution in which all things, now de-
tached and free-floating, collapse into-within Jameson's concep-
tualization-the marketplace.
Simply put, Jameson overstates the case. The equation of
schizophrenia with postmodernity neutralizes any historical mem-
ory. This process of historical amnesia may be at work within the
general discourses of mass cultural hypnotism. (Media representa-
tions of the noxious presidential "elections" serve as good an ex-
ample as any. Where in the mass media are stored memories of the
war with Iraq, the savings and loan bailouts, the upward redistri-
bution of wealth?) As the 1992 insurrection in Los Angeles should
serve to show, historical memory cannot be erased with the punch
of a button. This is particularly true among those communities and
constituencies who have borne the brunt of history. Another ex-
ample lies in the construction of the AIDS quilt-memory serves
to inform acts of defiance and rage.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari give schizophrenia a more
positive spin than Jameson. Schizophrenia characterizes a revolu-
tionary tendency of desire that produces liberating movements
against the structures of systemic order. Modern societies are
caught "between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as
an overcoding and reterritorializing unity" and the schizophrenic
"unfettered flows that carry them toward an absolute threshold."
Our societies organize themselves around systems that can move
either toward a regime of stratified order or dissolve into fluid
movement toward a joyful chaos. Societies thus "recode with all
their might, with world-wide dictatorship, local dictators, and an
all-powerful police, while decoding-or allowing the decoding
of-the fluent quantities of their capital and their populations.
They are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, neoarcha-
ism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia" (260). Deleuze
and Guattari speak more persuasively to the potentially empow-
ering movements a dissolution of systems-deterritorialization-
can entail. However, the fact that these deterritorializations also
resonate with dispossession and displacement grounds the "lines
of flight" along which desire moves. The anti-oedipal model-
Nomads and Migrants 167
2. Mapping Borderlands
3. TravelingJones
4. Settlements
5. Dispersal
Yet no sooner do they meet than they again seem to diverge.
For the postmodern dissolution of the subject-a fact viewed as
either inevitable (a la Jameson) or desirable (a la Baudrillard)-
runs counter to the desires expressed by the multicultural. In the
margin, subjectivity is a condition still staunchly to be sought.6
Postmodernism, if it is understood as a poststructural position, fails
to allow for the construction of self-identity. In his discussion of the
postmodern condition, Lyotard claims, for example: "The narra-
tive function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers,
Nomads and Migrants 179
its great voyages, its great goal" (xxiv). He slides from the dismissal
of grands recits (a useful move for advocating the multicultural) to
a questioning of agency in toto (a move not so useful). His confla-
tion of postmodernism and poststructuralism marks the weakness
of his definition. As Radhakrishnan underscores:
6. Locality
ing, is, Santos argues, total: "The localism involved is the localism
of context, not the localism of static spaces and immemorial tradi-
tions. It is an internationalist localism, without a solid genius loci
. ." (100). Postmodern knowledge works at the interstices of para-
digms, negotiates through (historical, cultural, economic) contexts.
The specificity of the local does not preclude connections to larger
systems of social organization. The local and its politics need not
remain superficially "local." Not a politics of populism, politics of
the local represents a politics of rhizomic resistance.
Thus Wahneema Lubiano scrutinizes David Harvey's invoca-
tion of the 1960s "revolutionary" slogan-"Think globally. Act lo-
cally." This scrutiny emerges from the concern over what precisely
a politics of rhizomic resistance may signify. A multicultural post-
modern political practice of the local, Lubiano finally admonishes,
"in cultural resistance terms, might require some lack of sureness,
confidence, some awareness of what Spivak [in The Post-Colonial
Critic]calls 'vulnerability' (18), or, to paraphrase Foster [in TheAnti-
Aesthetic] a willingness to recognize that a representation may
'mean' differently in place, in moment, and in particular minds"
(159). A multicultural postmodernism foregrounds the localism of
context, the specificity of devalued knowledges and histories re-
pressed by the hegemonic "political unconscious," and the poten-
tial for the local to achieve some significant and lasting social
change.
From Jameson's view, however, there is no escaping the need
for a global (class-bound) vision of politics. To describe the longing
for class politics of some older type as simply some "nostalgia," he
notes, "is about as adequate as to characterize the body's hunger,
before dinner, as a 'nostalgia for food"' (Postmodernism331). We
might admire the metaphor but remain suspicious of its point.
Jameson incessantly privileges class over race as a site upon
which to contest discourses of oppression. In "Periodizing the 60s,"
he argues that the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955 formed
Kicked out of the global political arena, the marginal are left to
squabble among local issues that preclude any genuine systemic
transformation.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos allows us a somewhat different
view of this historical development. He argues that "the relative
weakening of class practices and of class politics has been compen-
sated for by the emergence of new agonistic spaces that propose
new social postmaterialist and political agendas (peace, ecology,
sexual and racial equality) to be acted out by new insurgent groups
and social movements" (97). He goes on to note that the discovery
that capitalism produces classes, and "that classes are the organiz-
ing matrix of social transformation" was a nineteenth-century dis-
covery: "The twentieth century enters the historical scene only
when it discovers that capitalism also produces racial and sex-
ual differences and that these can also be nodal points for social
struggles" (97). The multicultural provides critical insight into the
processes by which racial and ethnic others can form and have
formed "nodal points for social struggle." Santos's position offers
a vision of politics beyond class, one which moves away from a
showdown between a powerful master discourse (Marxism) and
a contradictory or negating discourse (radical locality). Politics of
locality do not seek to overthrow a Marxist revolutionary project
with another master narrative. Rather, the narrative of locality
functions to supplement other narratives, other political configu-
rations.
7. Migration
Multiculturalism can form a discourse which, as it critiques
violence, precludes the violence of replication. To be an effective
discourse, it cannot propose the substitution of one master dis-
course for another. Homi Bhabha, therefore, argues for a supple-
mentary minority position. Bhabha seeks to articulate agency and
empowerment for the marginal couched not in terms of over-
throwing (and so replicating) or capturing (and therefore em-
Nomads and Migrants 185
ploying) the powers of the state: "Insinuating itself into the terms
of reference of the dominant discourse, the supplementary antag-
onizes the implicit power to generalize, to produce the sociological
solidity" (306). The multicultural critic must be aware of avoiding
the processes that replicate, reflect, reproduce the tyranny of glob-
alizing discourses even as they are combated.
Hence the significance of negotiation as a technique associ-
ated with the migratory. The point becomes not to deny the poten-
tiality of postmodern thought for multicultural issues, nor to erase
one's position as a compromised critic of dominant culture, nor to
negate multiculturalism's ability to speak to and with and through
postmodernism. Rather-caught between the rock of practice and
the hard place of theory-one might want to attempt a series of
negotiations that wed a contractual sense of power and a naviga-
tional sense of journey. A migratory reading wends between the
Scylla of the local and the Charybdis of the total, between the devil
that historical and cultural specificity can be and the deep murky
seas of essentialization and homogeneity. This rough passage,
Linda Hutcheon suggests, is "inside yet outside, inscribing yet con-
testing, complicitous yet critical" (158). A complicitous critique, the
migratory represents a model by which difficult cultural and politi-
cal terrain can be successfully traversed. More to the point, the
migratory also evokes within its discursive strategies the same pro-
cess of negotiation undertaken by migrant groups caught between
poverty and repression in their homelands and cultural dislocation
and oppressive marginalization in the centers of power to which
they flee.
A practice already implicit in the multicultural condition be-
comes the necessary element for deploying multicultural issues
within a postmodern cultural space: continuous critical negotia-
tion, an endless engagement with contradictory positions. These
engagements seek neither to refute nor overthrow particular his-
torically inscribed concepts. Instead, they attempt "to engage with
the 'anterior' space of the sign that structures the symbolic lan-
guage of alternative, antagonistic cultural practices" (Bhabha 313).
This engagement takes the form of a type of genealogy, the tracing
of the discontinuous region of multicultural subjectivity, the retell-
ing of stories otherwise forgotten. To form a resistant practice
across the fields of the multicultural and the postmodern involves
186 Rafael Perez-Torres
Notes
I wish to acknowledge the University of Wisconsin System Institute on Race
and Ethnicity, which provided funding for the period in which I wrote this essay.
I am indebted as well to Gordon Hutner and Larry Scanlon for their keen read-
ings and helpful suggestions.
Nomads and Migrants 187
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